


if you build the fire, come sing

by kay_cricketed



Category: Rise of the Guardians (2012)
Genre: M/M, Pre-Slash, ill children
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-11-30
Updated: 2013-01-27
Packaged: 2017-11-19 21:22:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,049
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/577803
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kay_cricketed/pseuds/kay_cricketed
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Twelve years after Jack Frost becomes a guardian, a new threat grows insidiously inside the hearts of children across the globe. And while Jack may be over 300 years old in spirit, his physical form is young enough to become infected. With Easter around the corner, and a race down to the clock to procure Jack's cure from Pitch Black, Bunnymund has his work cut out for him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. the first tooth

**Author's Note:**

> In my head, this is a continuation of "There is Such a Boy" (http://archiveofourown.org/works/570178), but it can be read without that fic. It may simply explain a little more of the time leading up to the story.

It comes as an incisor: tiny, pearly white and speckled with blood. She cups the tooth in her hand and her wings beat quicksilver—she can’t deny that she’s nervous, that she senses this tooth is _not quite right_. It holds no memory. It pulses weakly, crumbling between her fingers.

The black sand wedged deep into the gummy root terrifies Toothiana. Her faeries chitter, hiding behind her head.

“Girls,” she whispers, “steady on. Let’s not be hasty.”

It’s been twelve years since last Toothiana saw Pitch, and in those moments, she had punched him hard enough to knock a canine out. After the Nightmares dragged Pitch howling and clawing back beneath the bed, she’d done her best to put him out of her mind. She moved on, rebuilding her depository for the children’s memories and continuing to collect them as if her existence had never been threatened, as if her guardianship remained unchallenged. Toothiana doesn’t believe in crying over spilt milk, as it were. She learns her lessons and presses forward.

But she does remember: this black sand, gritty in her palm and cold to the touch. She remembers it well.

Toothiana sinks in the air, settling on a perch and studying the tooth intently. She must be certain. She can’t alert the others for nothing. Unlike North, Toothiana doesn’t rely on her belly, and unlike Sandy, she has little experience with dream remnants. Teeth, though—yes, she knows teeth, and this tiny precious incisor, it belongs to a tiny precious Welsh girl who loves blue teddy bears and singing and canaries. _She flosses,_ Toothiana muses, turning the fragile incisor over under her thumb. _I can tell. I can see how well she takes care of her teeth. So why? Why is it ruined?_

The black sand particles are few but irritating. She wills the tooth to present its memory, but nothing happens. The tooth is barren. This has never happened before. One can’t _take_ a memory.

Even as Toothiana starts to panic, another one of her faeries appears, squeaking in alarm. Between her miniature hands, there is another tooth, fast corroding. The luminescent white is already blackening as ash.

Toothiana lunges for it, and her fear burns.

Within minutes, she begins her flight to Santoff Clausen.

 

They’re deep in the mountains of Tibet, so high in the atmosphere that even Jack can’t seem to catch his breath. He laughs regardless, cartwheeling barefoot through the freshly fallen snow and sending up flurries in his wake. “This is amazing!”

“Be _quiet_ ,” Bunnymund hisses at him. “You want to wake every monk and his mule for thirty miles?”

Jack slides to a stop. He pretends to consider, tapping his chin. “They might not know what to do with the Easter Bunny.”

“Too right.” Bunnymund makes a face and rubs his arms briskly, upending his fur and shifting the basket hooked on his elbow. Inside, Jack can hear the eggs rustling, moving in tiny increments as they seek earth to walk on. The weird factor about that has finally worn off. Mostly. “Not much for this part of the world, me. Believers, plenty—just not the ones interested in my googies.”

The under-populated village is shadowed by the mountain, but Jack can still glimpse the soft distant lights of its temple ahead. Up on high, the stars are bright as glass in the infinite blue and he can see for miles in every direction, without ever leaving the ground. The homes around them are silent, dark, not yet visited by the Sandman’s beautiful craftsmanship. He retraces his footprints in the snow, relishing as ever the fact that he is something solid—believed in, made physical and visible to the human eye. He can leave footprints. He can see himself in mirrors.

Bunnymund watches him.

Jack grins at him. “You look like a snow rabbit. All white fur.”

That prompts a reaction: annoyance, the scrunch of his brow. Bunnymund huffs and cradles his basket protectively, taking the lead and guiding them further into the village. “S’pose it’s better than a kangaroo,” because he will _never_ let Jack forget that, even all these years later, “but let’s get this over with. Soon as we’re done, it’s back to the warm warren for this rabbit.”

Jack follows him. “So, why three days before Easter? Why not _on_ Easter? Isn’t that like cheating?

“I’ve got enough to think about on Easter without worrying about Nyima Paljor, the only believer in the Easter Bunny for six hundred miles,” Bunnymund says. “It’s not cheating, it’s _time management_. Besides, cold as it is up here, the eggs will still be frozen by Sunday.”

“Unless he finds them before that. Then he knows you cheated.”

Bunnymund chuckles. “You’ve seen the first-time believers by now, mate. Believe me, being a little off the calendar won’t change a thing.”

Oh. Jack feels warmth spread, as delicate as his tendrils of frost, throughout his chest and throat. Yeah, he has seen them. Jamie will always be Jack’s first believer, but he’s not the only one—not anymore. The children have come to know Jack Frost’s name and he loves every moment, but especially the _first time_ they invoke his name: reverent, awed, giving him form before their very eyes. 

They stop in front of a stone home, its small rectangular windows covered in striped fabric and frame painted blue. The yard is empty and barren except for the light but insubstantial dusting of new snowfall. “Hm,” says Bunnymund. “Pretty, uh, sparse. Might have to hide ‘em inside.”

“Your plan is blowing up by the second,” Jack says.

“And you _didn’t have to come_.”

“What, and miss this?” Jack stretches his arms up behind his head, looking up at the sky. “Nothing’s funnier than a rabbit shooing away a herd of yaks.”

“Ha,” says Bunnymund. He thumps his foot and opens a hole beneath them.

Two seconds later, Jack stumbles into a dresser in some kid’s room—“Oh my god,” he gasps, “ _thanks_ for the warning, cottontail!”—and then he’s being shushed, which doesn’t remotely make things better. The bedroom is dark and cold, but there are tiny toys lined up on the dresser that look distinctly like they might have North’s personal touch. The bed is pushed against the corner and a child sleeps in it, his head a nest of black, his mouth open and breathing damp.

Jack quiets without being told again. He perches on top of a small writing desk, watching as Bunnymund carefully hides the eggs around the bedroom. They waddle out on their spindly legs and settle in secret places: halfway behind a bookcase, inside a pencil box, underneath an upturned shoe. 

One of the eggs tries to scurry out into the hallway, but Jack is quick to scoop it up again. He deposits the egg gently in the boy’s bed, cupped in his limp hands. As soon as the kid wakes up, he’ll have his Easter Sunday.

When Jack looks up, Bunnymund is watching him again.

He shoves his hands in the pocket of his hoodie and shrugs. _What_?

For a moment, he thinks Bunnymund is about to say something. Instead, the rabbit shakes his head and gestures: _come on then_.

Jack does come and this time, he’s prepared for the hole that swallows them up and takes them back outside into the snowfall. He’s a little surprised about that—he’d expected the warren in all its bright colors and rich green foliage—but when he squints at Bunnymund, the rabbit shrugs. He says, “Thought you’d leap at the chance to leave your signature on all these windows, eh?”

Oh _yeah_ , Jack is all about that. He smirks and rubs his hands together. “It’s about time I branched out in Tibet.”

“Go on, then. I’m gonna sit here. Freezing.”

“Great!” And he’s off, flitting from rooftop to rooftop, window to window, pressing his palms into the glass until the frost is thick and beautiful. He writes his name sometimes, nearly indecipherable in the swirls. Other times, he simply lets the snow curl around his hand to leave an unmistakable print on the third-floor window. He’s made it through a good half of the town, his laughter thin from the atmosphere but full in its joy, when the sky—

It just _lights up_ , green and pink and gold.

Jack gapes at it. He twists around, looking for Bunnymund, and then suddenly the rabbit’s there beside him with his ears straight up in the air. “Trouble,” he says, brusque in a way he hasn’t been for a few years now. Not to Jack, anyway.

“Is that the beacon thing North talked about?”

“The gathering light? You bet.”

“So it’s bad?”

“Probably,” says Bunnymund. He makes a pained face, like he’s taken a drink of sour milk. “I mean, last time we got _you_.”

Jack punches him in the shoulder. He makes sure it hurts as much as an iceball to the face would, which means _a lot_. 

(They go by tunnel. Bunnymund’s never gotten the hang of flying and Jack has come to know these earthy passageways as well as the woods of his hometown. In their wake, there grow flowers that are chilled to the touch.)

 

When they arrive, North is patting his stomach with his huge hands and insisting, “I feel it—in my _belly_.”

Above Sandman’s head, there are numerous shapes going too fast for Jack to recognize. One might be a hang glider. Or it might be a manta ray. It’s a little difficult to figure out. 

“If this is about a new guardian,” Bunnymund announces, “we’re still training the last one.”

Jack thinks about punching him again, but he doesn’t. 

“Jack! Bunny!” North booms. He holds his arms open to them in sincere welcome, something Jack has never quite gotten used to (these weirdoes, their easy friendship, the _touching_ ). “It is good to see you, but of course, it is not good to see you… circumstances being what they are…”

Toothiana smiles at them, flitting closer. Her faeries swoon behind her and fly a circle around Bunnymund and Jack. Which is just—weird. They’ve been doing that for a while now.

“Ladies,” Toothiana says, “let’s not be silly.”

“Hey, Tooth,” says Jack. He accepts her fond pat to the cheek, the twitch of her fingers as she resists diving into his mouth and examining his molars appreciated. He smiles at her because she’s always been kind to him, even when he hasn’t deserved it.

“Jack,” she says, and she’s not smiling anymore, “it’s awful. So awful.”

“What? What is it?” His chest tightens, heart gripped with fear in a way that draws everything else inside him together. He immediately thinks of Pitch—the black shade of nightmares, the cajoling murmur that haunts his more disturbing dreams. He thinks about losing the children’s beliefs that he’s so carefully cultivated.

Bunnymund nudges him, and Jack shudders as he comes back to himself. There’s ice crystallized across the floor around them. He makes a face. “Oops.”

“It ain’t Pitch?” Bunnymund asks, voice low. He fingers his boomerang, notching at the smooth wood. “Can’t be askin’ us for dinner—not with the aurora, mate.”

“No, I only wish.” North sighs, tugging at his beard. “Come, drink eggnog. We must speak about a new strangeness in the world.”

Sandman offers something he’s holding to Toothiana. It’s only when she accepts the meager offerings that Jack realizes they are tiny white fragments of enamel, cradled in a pile of black sand. The way she looks at him—full of hope.

He shakes his head, golden moonface sad. No.

She clutches the handful to her feathered chest. They go to drink the eggnog. Out in the sky, the moon slowly meanders its way across the clouds, on route to its zenith.


	2. the midnight visit

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm so sorry this update has taken forever! Moreover, it's not a very exciting one. I apologize. D: However, things are about to speed up quite a bit after this, with Jack becoming infected and the search for a door under a bed. Hopefully that will be a much better update. Thank you for all the amazing comments so far, guys!

There’s a particularly stubborn elf that keeps crawling up the back of Jack’s chair, probably hoping to reach the cookie plate on the table. For the first few minutes, Jack entertains himself by knocking the elf back down with his staff, snickering at its indignant jingle and inevitable retry. Then Toothiana begins to speak. After that, Jack forgets the elf because what she’s saying isn’t very funny at all. Everyone else at the table is silent, eggnog left curdling in their cups. Jack can hear the normally undetectable shaking of the window shutters against each other, attempting to struggle free from their latches under the pickings of the wild wind.

“These were only the first two of many,” she tells them quietly, letting the black sand sprinkle out of her hand and onto the table. She tries to pick out what is left of the teeth from its spread, tears brimming on her lashes.

“There are more?” asks Jack, squeezing his arm close to his side.

“In the past few hours alone, dozens.” Toothiana takes a deep breath, wings twitching as if in pain. “One from Bombay. Two in South America. _Seven_ in Canada, but there doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to where it happens or why. It happens indiscriminately no matter where the children live or their ages. Children in their _preteens_ are losing teeth and that’s never happened—those will never grow back.” She shows them the tiniest glint of moon in between her fingers: the last shard of a tooth. “This is the first. It’s already corroded so much that this is all that’s left. The others were the same. Some of them never made it back at all and my faeries lost every speck except what they could carry cupped in their hands.”

“And the deterioration didn’t start until after the tooth was pulled?” Bunnymund asks, scratching his whiskers.

“That was my first concern. I’ve sent some of my faeries to check on the children and it’s… worse than I thought.”

“I’m not even sure what you _thought_ ,” mutters Bunnymund. “It doesn’t make any sense. Pitch’s nightmare stuff in the teeth?”

“The _children_ ,” North implores, leaning his girth over the table. “Tooth, the children—they are safe?”

“They’re sick,” Toothiana says with some difficulty. She folds her arms over her heart, the vibrant greens of her plumage growing dusky. Her grief is as easily read as a book, as words put to breath. “Not all of them, but most. And if I’m right, the others who have lost their teeth will follow soon. It may be even bigger than that, it may even be the whole _world_. We can’t know this soon. I just—don’t understand. Who would do this?”

Sandman rubs his cheek, frowning. For a moment, none of them have anything to say—this is not what they expected.

“What do you mean, _sick_ ,” Bunnymund demands at last, leaning in over the table with his ears at half-mast. The fur shaded with his markings is up on its end and Jack makes himself look away, worrying at his hoodie’s hem. “There’s none of us that can do something like that. Not even the Boogeyman.”

North gets up to refill his cup of eggnog. He adds a healthy shake of cinnamon to its top film, grim countenance making his eyes less bright, less merry.

“But it’s too much of a coincidence,” says Toothiana. “Most of the children whose teeth are filled with nightmare sand are getting weaker. Some of them are already bedridden. Their parents are so worried.”

“Yeah, okay, but sick _how_?” Jack asks.

She gives him an apologetic, tremulous smile. She doesn’t know, then. This isn’t particularly surprising given how distant some of the guardians have become from their charges, but at least Jack has a little more experience in this. He knows children and their fevers, their ouches, their coughs and sniffles and broken bones. He’s scratched frost into their window glass to entertain them and blown a cool touch of winter across cherry-red cheeks. He has seen them succumb. He has seen them die.

He breaks one of the Christmas cookies in half, then into quarters. “We should check it out,” he says. “If their parents noticed, that means they’ve seen a doctor. Maybe they know more than we do right now, even if they don’t know the reason for it. If we can do a little detective work, we’ll be a lot closer to figuring out whether it’s all connected.”

“The sand _could_ be a coincidence,” North admits. “Children get sick. Too many cookies. Bad milk.”

Sandman makes a face. Gold glitter shapes around his left ear, creating a picture of Pitch Black surrounded in furrows of hungry, angry sandstorm. He shakes his hand around in the sand, discarding it with a surprising amount of violence. Then again, out of all of them, Sandman has been the most wronged by Pitch Black and perhaps it ought not to be a surprise at all.

“Probably not,” says Bunnymund. “Sandy’s got it right. He’s gotta be up to something. If there aren’t any memories in the teeth, sick or no, it’s not all apples with the lil’ ones.”

Jack chews on his cookie, frozen crumbs sticking to his cheek. He swallows and wipes them away before anyone can say something smart about it. “So, that’s settled. Who’s up for a field trip? Korea, anyone?”

“Actually, Jack,” and Toothiana’s voice is quiet and wretched, “we won’t have to go much farther than Burgess.”

The whole table turns to him.

_No_. The word forms silent on his lips before the understanding reaches, quick on its heels. Jack’s heart plummets, losing itself somewhere in the bottom of his stomach. In between the fall, he finds the name to put to his distress, and with that name he thinks about Jamie Bennett: his gap-toothed smile, the brave quaver in his voice when he stood up to Pitch Black, the first expression of wonder when _Jack Frost_ made it snow in his room. Jamie, who once spread the story of a lonely winter spirit who gifts children with snow days. _Jamie_ , the last light in the world. Though it’s been many years since Jack has seen him, he has never forgotten.

Jack’s hand, tucked around his arm as if to hold himself back from making any stupid gestures, freezes to the fabric of his hoodie. “No,” he says, this time with throat and tongue, and he doesn’t recognize his own voice.

Bunnymund holds out an arm as if he can sense what Jack’s going to do, just before he does it. His eyes are narrowed. “Jack, don’t—”

It’s too late. Jack pushes back against the table and goes spinning up into the air from his chair. He calls on the north wind, he calls on the moon, and his staff is beneath him and then only the tangled gust that will take him home, take him back to Burgess and the lake and the first child, his very first.

Jack Frost flies.

 

“Bloody brumby,” Bunnymund says over the clatter of the window shutters as they punch together in the aftermath of Jack’s departure. He goes to the window and fastens it shut again, and if he searches the sky for a glitter of white in the prevailing black, no one needs to be the wiser. He doesn’t find it, anyway. Jack is long gone.

“Oh no,” Toothiana despairs. “I’m so sorry, Bunny. I didn’t realize what he’d think when I said it. I didn’t know he’d—run.”

“Don’t see why I need an apology,” he tells her, returning to the table. He dusts the snow from his forearms as if it’s no big deal, just tidying up. “He’s still pretty new to this job. Practically a kid himself. Probably ought to follow ‘im, though, before he makes a mess of it.”

“Jack is more than kid,” North scoffs, fussing his beard. “He is a guardian and he makes good example for us all.” He gives Bunnymund the eye—the big guy’s got a gut instinct that rivals none and Bunnymund hates that he’s sometimes on the other side of that perfect clarity, that uncomfortably forgiving _knowingness_ —before clapping his massive hands together. “But we go! To the sleigh.”

Sandman throws up his hands in excitement.

“Uh, that would be a resounding _no_ ,” says Bunnymund.

(He knows why Toothiana apologizes to him. He knows why North looks at him with acuity and why Sandman sometimes gives him dreams of a soft, quiet winter wherein all the world is lit only by the moon and the yellow of streetlamps. _Don’t_ , he wants to tell them. _I understand hope better than any of you and I know best when there is none to be grown._ )

 

The town of Burgess is a foldout of pastel-perfect greenery and dandelions spread out like chicken feed across the hillsides. The leaves are already beginning to bud and flower; spring has been kind to them. This is because Jack has been prepping up for a surprise freak snowstorm the night before Easter—it’s tradition and besides, often the best part about snowfall is when the ground is a clean slate—but now the lack of ice frightens him, puts a tremble into his landing as his bare feet slam into the tree branch. It takes Jack a moment to right himself. His stomach reshuffles its contents. He’d flown so fast that his cheeks feel more bitten than usual, chapped and raw. The town is laid out silent before him and this, more than anything, calms something of the dread poisoning his thoughts.

He takes this moment to breathe, to ease his panic. It’s going to be okay. He needs to relax, chill out. This is not how a guardian of fun ought to react to a pinch of bad news.

So maybe he shouldn’t have raced out of Santoff Clausen like that. Whatever. Jack knows he’s not the best guardian ever. It’s fine. He’s got to think about Jamie—what Toothiana said, that’s the only thing she could’ve meant. Jamie’s in trouble and Jack’s got to save him, in the same way that Jamie saved Jack. They _owe_ Jamie. Not just Jack, but all of them.

And if the Boogeyman has poked even a fingernail at the kid, Jack has every intention of freezing him solid and dumping him in the Arctic Ocean.

Part of Jack actually expects Pitch to be lurking in the shadows as he flits from the trees surrounding the lake to the fence separating the steep hill from Jamie’s childhood home. The fence creaks under his weight, quivering. Jack looks at the house all lit up in the dark, its gutters sagging heavy and the swing in the front yard forlorn and unused, and he considers now that time is against him. It has been twelve years since Jack opened Jamie Bennett’s window. It’s been _six_ since he’d last seen the boy at all. By now he’s—an adult.

Jack has possibly not thought this through.

He groans, sitting on the fence and beating his forehead against his palm. “You are an _idiot_ ,” he says. He’d just flown like a bat out of the belfry in Santoff Clausen for nothing. In front of everyone, no less.

Jamie can’t have been infected by anything meant for children because he isn’t one, anymore. He has long lost all of his baby teeth and grown in permanent residents. Time is—so weird. Jack forgets, sometimes. He forgets that the planet turns to keep sight of the waning moon and he forgets that with it, every child grows an inch more.

In the bright windows of the second floor of the house, shadows move from square to square, trace shapes of people who may or may not even be the Bennetts. Jack wishes he’d checked up sooner now, so he’d know. He’s been so busy. Figuring out this guardian thing, spreading his name. Spending time in the warren and pranking Bunnymund.

Despite the relief of knowing Jamie’s probably safe, he can’t help but creep closer to the house, hopping from the fence to the soft grass. He lets the wind carry him high, to one of the windows with light: a blue and pink room, shadowed with only the bedside lamp to bring its colors into stark relief. Jack knows this room, too.

Someone is seated beside the bed in a puffed-up blue armchair. Jack can see their hand, the way every so often they reach to stroke blonde crimped curls from a sleeping face. The girl in the bed—Sophie, tiny runaway Sophie Bennett. Yes, he knows this room and who sleeps there, no longer so tiny, on the cusp of adulthood.

And the hand, the man in the armchair—he stands as if he hears something out in the dark. He looks toward the hallway.

“Jamie?” Even as he whispers the name, Jack doesn’t expect his first believer to turn around and see him hovering outside of the window. After all, it’s been twelve years and Jamie is taller than Jack now, built wide around the shoulders—in between heaving snowballs at his friends and reading stories about Bigfoot, Jamie Bennett has grown up.

But Jamie does turn. His face is the same: clean-shaven and soft, eyes too big for his head. If his jaw is wider, if his voice a pitch lower, Jack barely notices at all because that’s when Jamie murmurs, “Jack Frost?”

 

Jamie insists on making hot cocoa. “I don’t do so well with hot,” Jack tells him, but he still accepts the mug shoved into his hands when it comes. The cocoa congeals and becomes lukewarm immediately. Oh well.

“I can’t believe it’s you,” Jamie keeps saying. “Wow. Jack Frost—looking just the same as you did before. Wow. I can’t _even_. How is this happening? This is amazing.”

Jack can’t believe it, either. He’s never been _seen_ by an adult before, but then, adults don’t believe anymore. They leave their childhood dreams and wishes behind them. Maybe there’s a loophole, after all? He can’t say, not without asking North.

Or perhaps the man in the moon is up to his mysterious ways again.

The clock dongs in the lower levels of the house and Jamie perches on the edge of Sophie’s mattress, staring intently at Jack as if he might disappear. The focus is unnerving; Jack slides down in the armchair and sips the lumpy cocoa. He looks at Sophie, who hasn’t stirred. Her face is pale and gaunt, her lips without any color at all.

“She’s sick,” says Jack.

Jamie follows his gaze. He softens. “Yeah. It’s so bad, Mom called me home from college. It’s my first year, you know?”

What Jack remembers of little Sophie is how small she had looked, cradled in Bunnymund’s furry arms. He remembers her peals of laughter and the heat from her tiny body as she clung to him in sleep, refusing to let go as he returned her to bed. By the looks of it, she’s taller than Jack now: a skinny beanpole with wild hair and a freckle cluster beneath her left eye. She sleeps deeply but with a palpable aura of disquiet, as if she wants to wake but cannot. Jack resists the impulse to reach out and shake her out of her dreams, to save her from the trap.

“What’s wrong with her?” he asks.

Jamie shrugs. He adjusts the blanket covering his sister’s shoulders. “Not sure. Mom said she’s been home from school for about a week. She just… gets tired. It’s like something’s broken inside her. The doctors think it might have to do with her heart, but we’re still waiting on some results.”

“Something’s broken with her heart? Like what?”

“I don’t know,” says Jamie. “Whatever makes a heart keep going, I guess.”

In the bed, Sophie moans quietly and reaches out for her brother’s hand. Jamie gives it to her, his brow furrowed. He pets her knuckles and hums in a reassuring drone beneath his breath. The song seems familiar—some nursery rhyme, some bit of imagination Jack has heard inside nurseries on cold nights.

Jack’s heart aches. _Bunny’s gonna be so upset,_ he thinks. He can barely put a name to his own fear. He knows what it means to be a brother looking after a little sister, throwing her from the brink of danger no matter the consequences. But it had been Bunnymund who cuddled her—and Bunnymund who paints a special egg for her, every year. Jack has already seen this year’s masterpiece. It has yellow daisies growing out of an enameled ocean.

They need to find answers. They need to find Pitch.

“I’m going to help her,” he tells Jamie, setting the cocoa aside. He grins and taps the side of his nose. “Jack Frost is on the job again.”

Jamie looks up at him. “Can you save her?” he asks, voice shaking. There is more terror in him than Jack has ever seen.

He grins, because that is what Jack Frost does. “Don’t be scared,” he says. “It’s gonna be okay.”

(Let him be telling the truth again. Let all the times Jack has to say these words be prophetic, and let the children he’s grown to adore find their way off the ice.)

Jamie closes his eyes; maybe he’s willing himself to believe the impossible all over again. The little lady, Jack leaves with another promise. He touches her cheek, hoping the chill will bring some pink back to its graveyard. 

To his shock, Sophie grabs his hoodie.

It startles him so badly, Jack almost trips back over his own feet. But her grip is not tight, her face is lax, and her breathing remains deep and even and placid. She’s still sleeping, he realizes. “Whew,” he says. “She’s still grabby.”

“Yeah,” Jamie says.

Jack gently wrestles his hoodie from her clasp, then backs away from the bed. He looks on Jamie and his sister’s sleeping visage again. Outside, he can hear the distant chime of sleigh bells and knows he must go. “I’ll be back,” he swears to them, hauling open the window. “I’ll find some way to fix things. Okay? I’ll be back.”

Then he slips out into the dark. Gold dust is forming in a cloud that resembles a giant willow tree over the lakebed, huge and billowing and sad.


End file.
